Artists Space

Show & Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material
Edited by Julie Ault
Published by Four Corners Books, 2010

Book Launch
September 26, 2010, 7pm

Show & Tell is the first monograph on Group Material, and charts the group's activities, with essays by original members, plus original documents, photographs, drawings, correspondence and interviews.

Book cover design featuring an image of a large room with red walls. A banner of colorful flags hangs from the ceiling. A large collection of objects is scattered on the floor, including coca-cola bottles, posters, chip bags, paint cans, detergent bottles, and other assorted items.
Show and Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material, edited by Julie Ault, published by Four Corners Books, 2010. [Book cover design featuring an image of a large room with red walls. A banner of colorful flags hangs from the ceiling. A large collection of objects is scattered on the floor, including coca-cola bottles, posters, chip bags, paint cans, detergent bottles, and other assorted items.]

In 1979, the artist collective Group Material opened a storefront at East 13th Street on New York's Lower East Side, from which they launched exhibitions that radically overhauled curatorial thought, setting art alongside artifacts, documentary material and store bought objects, within exhibitions that were oriented around topical social concerns. Group Material's original members — Julie Ault, Patrick Brennan, Beth Jaker, Mundy McLaughlin, Marybeth Nelson, Tim Rollins and Peter Szypula — came from backgrounds in feminism, Marxist theory, design and popular culture, and curated classic exhibits reflecting this eclecticism, such as It's a Gender Show, AIDS Timeline and The People's Choice—a collection of everyday objects (wedding photos, dolls, even a cigarette-pack collage) gathered from people living on their block.

Organized by former group members in keeping with the methods and aims Group Material employed, Show & Tell charts the origins, processes, developments, projects and contexts of the group’s activities, and draws heavily from Group Material’s archive, including original documents, photographs, drawings, correspondence, artifacts, anecdotal information and texts.

Behind the Timeline: Collected Histories has accounts by Mike Glier, Richard Meyer, Nayland Blake, Stevan Evans, Tom Kalin, Robert Buck, Larry Rinder, Sharon Siskin, John Lindell, Glen Helfand, Edd Russo, Andrea Miller-Keller, and Patrick O’Connell.

Essays by Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, Sabrina Locks and Tim Rollins further illuminate the methods and principles of Group Material’s practice.

8.5 x 11 in. / 272 pgs / illust: c. 200 color / 50 b&w
ISBN: 978-0-9561928-1-3

Group Material created 45 projects during its period of activities (1979-1996), each represented through installation photography and information from original proposals, exhibition statements, press releases, responses, etc. One emblematic exhibition project, AIDS Timeline, is examined in detail from collected material and newly conducted interviews.